KAZUHIKO WASHIO

STATEMENT:

“Memorization” is not an act of crystallizing the past.

Memories, created by finding and connecting with stories of particular moments, are not just accumulated in human mind; memories are constantly moving, and they help form the present and the future by reflecting the stories on different spaces and human minds.

Indeed, “memorization” is a creative process, and that is where the power of photography – creative and positive – comes from.

Memories, which are rooted in the land we live in, are subtly transformed as society becomes increasingly complex and diversified. What photography can do is to cultivate, look at, and keep the traces of those memories alive – to be passed on to the future generations.

BIO:

Born in Hyogo, Japan.

1998 Beginning of self-taught photographic career. In 2009, “Hotel Fareast”, a collection of photographs taken over a five-year period on overseas travelers visiting Japan, won Photo Documentary Nippon Award (Guardian Garden). The collection, titled “Hotel Fareast”, was published in 2009 by AKAAKA art publishing. (This “Hotel Fareast” project is still ongoing over ten years)
In 2011, immediately after the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, Washio went on fieldwork with Naoki Ikezawa, a Japanese author/poet, in the affected areas. The outcome of the joint fieldwork were a publication “Haru wo Urandari Shinai” and a photography book “On The Horizon”. In 2014, “To The Sea” a collection of photographs of coastlines across Japan taken over fifteen years, will be published by AKAAKA art publishing, in cooperation with Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio、a Nobel Prize novelist. Washio’s photographic works consistently and continually portray his home country, Japan, from a global or outsider’s perspective.